92 MUSICAL EVENTS Love' s Mazes IN 1954, Edward J. Dent wrote: The only way to understand Han- del's operas is the logical one: to begin with the librettos and read them word for word from beginning to end, and to do the same with the full scores, never allowing oneself to skip a note of the recitative, however "dry" it may appear to be. It is fatal to regard a Handel opera (or indeed any opera) as no more than a string of famous arias; It is a drama, inseparable from its action and stage settIng. A year later, the Handel Opera Socie- ty, formed under Dent's inspiration, staged its first production, of Handel's "Deidamia." "Hercules" followed in 1956, and "Alcina," with Joan Sutherland as its heroine, in 1957. For the last twenty-three years, the Society has generally put on two Handels a year at Sadler's Wells. (Last year's pair was "Partenope" and "Belshaz- zar.") In 1959, two other Handel opera series began: in the little U ni- corn Theatre, in Abingdon, and at the Barber Institute, in Birmingham. (There it was that Janet Baker sang Irene in "Tamerlano," Ariodan- te, and Orlando.) Most of Hande]'s forty-odd operas have now been revived-some of them in several productions- in the country where he lived and worked. Most of the mIstakes that can be made in their perfor- mance have long since been made. By trial and error, by blunder and bold ad ven ture, answers were found to the "problems" -of drama- turgy, of voice type, of staging, of instrumenta- tion-that they pose to modern performers and to modern audiences. But the lessons provided by two decades of steady performance remained largely unlearned by the big companies. I've not seen the English N a- tional's recent "Giulio Cesare" (which is to be re-created in San F ran- cisco this year), but Covent Garden's "Al- cina" and the English National's "Semele" were sorry exam- ples of a refusal to take Handel's dramas seriously, and the New York City Opera's "Cesare" was a travesty. The American Repertory Theatre, at the Loeb Drama Center, in Cam- bridge, is now presenting an "Or- lando" conceived closely in accord with Dent's counsel. Except for re- peats in the overture, this "Orlando" is done complete-all the arias, all the recitative. It is playing (to full houses) for a run of forty perfor- mances, which means that the singers, drawn on any night from a double-cast pool, can try new refinements, inflec- tions, and musical variations; that the performance grows; and that Cam- bridge and Boston enthusiasts can visit it again and again, discovering both differences and new beauties in a score performed with detailed, dedicated commitment Dent declared roundly and rightly that "Orlando" has "a very good li- ----==-- --- bretto" and that "the moral aspect of this opera is interesting." The titular hero is Christendom's doughty cham- pion distracted from his mission and driven to madness by his unrequited love for Angelica, Queen of Cathay. She, who spurned the hands of half Europe's princes, has fallen in love with the African soldier boy Medoro. That much is familiar from Ariosto. Handel adds two more characters: the shepherdess Dorinda, deserted by Medoro when the highborn Angelica crossed his path and dazzled him; and the mage Zoroaster, part counsellor and part conjurer, who cares for Or- lando and finally cures him of his infatuation. Like "Figaro" and "CosÌ Fan Tutte," the piece explores the in- tricacies and responsibilities of love in music that makes manifest and vivid its pangs, its joys, and its ambiguities. Act I ends with a trio in which Angelica and Medoro, happy wIth one another, try to console Dorinda, and each strand of feeling is surely spun. Act II is a breathtaking sequence of beautiful, emotional arias culminating in Or- lando's famous mad scene. Four years after "Orlando," Handel himself had a breakdown. His first biographer , John Mainwaring, remarked on the "violence of his passions" and continued: How greatly his senses \vere disordered at intervals, for a long time appeared from an hundred instances, which are better forgotten than recorded The most violent deviations from rea- son are usually Seen when the stronge"t faculties hap- pen to be thrown out of course. I \ \ \ \ \ The mad scene of Han- del's "Orlando" when violently and passionately enacted-as it was in Cambridge-is an inci- dent to arouse pity and terror. And Orlando's sudden return to reason, effected in the opera by a philtre brought from starry regions by an eagle, adumbrates Han- del's own restoration at Aix-Ia-Chapelle: "His cure, from . . . the quick- ness with which it was wrought, passed with the Nuns for a miracle." In short, "Orlando" when